One Of The Greatest Unsung Forces Of History
One of the great unsung forces of history is… stupidity. How different would our word today be if Hitler heeded a basic rule of warfare (NEVER start a war on two fronts) when he invaded Russia while fully engaged in a war against Western Europe? Similarly, what if British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the European Allie’s had resolved to stop Hitler in 1938 (before he had the fearsome military infrastructure he was later to develop) instead of appeasing the Germans by ceding Czechoslovakia to Hitler? Or how about what might have happened if China had cordoned off Wuhan and dealt with COVID (SARS 2) straight away, the way they had dealt with SARS 1? And, of course, the pride of stupidity place absolutely HAS to go to Hamas, who, on October 7, 2023, woefully underestimated Israel’s resolve and woefully overestimated the world’s readiness to come to their aid. All those rapes, tortures and murders did not, as expected, lead to a world wide intifada, but instead have resulted in the Gaza Strip being essentially reduced to rubble, millions of civilians displaced, hundreds of civilians wounded or dead, and what ever military infrastructure they previously had in place now being reduced to tatters. And, worse, especially in the Muslim mind, abject HUMILIATION.
Now, it is true that hindsight is always “20/20” but the outcomes of all of the examples listed above were quite predictable by any clear thinking leader.
So, stupidity reigns. And, like charity, stupidity begins at home. And, unfortunately, America, as educated as we claim to be, isn’t exempt from accusations of stupidity. So, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to take a look at stupidity in America.
Now, it would, however, be churlish and unfair, I suppose, to look for stupidity among America’s children. After all, the reason that we educate them is because they’re SUPPOSED to be stupid. What about high school students? Well, maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt, too, as one could claim that their intelligence is still in the formative stage. But, when we consider college students, we can, rightly, be judgemental. At that stage in life, they’ve had a minimum of 12 years of education, and, presumably, have had many years in which to have achieved some degree of maturity, so, I don’t think that it’s being unfair to expect them to have a modicum of intelligence and at least an spattering of knowledge in their craniums. With this in mind we turn our attention to the American college supporters of Hamas. To this end, I’d like to report on a study who’s results were recently published in an article in the the Wall Street Journal. On December 5, 2023, University of California, Berkeley, political science professor Ron E. Hassner wrote an article titled “From which river to which sea?”:
In Mr. Hassner’s own words: “When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).
That’s 86% of college students who either don’t understand or actively support a call to destroy Israel.
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. (!) Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
But we cannot blame many of the students. They never learned basic facts to begin with, and therefore they are receptive to antisemitic lies.
Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.
An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group….”
So, I’d like to thank Professor Hassner for demonstrating, quite elegantly, the role stupidity has in the promulgation of the antisemitic tsunami sweeping the globe. And as I said in my opening remarks, stupidity is one of the great forces of history. Unsung no more!